Former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump must wait to find out what sentence he will receive following his unprecedented felony conviction, but even if he receives a prison sentence, it won’t be the end of his campaign to return to the White House.
He is not the first candidate to run for office while incarcerated. That history began with Eugene V. Debs, who ran for the Socialist Party in 1920 and won about one million votes, or about 3 percent.
Americans speak out about Trump’s sentence
The situations are clearly different — Debs, for all her influence and stature, was effectively a fringe candidate that year — and Trump is already in office and almost certainly running as the nominee of one of America’s two major political parties — but there are similarities.
FILE – This is an undated portrait of socialist Eugene Debs. After an unprecedented felony conviction, former president and current Republican front-runner Donald Trump will have to wait to find out what his sentence will be. But even if he does end up spending time in prison, it won’t be the end of his campaign to get back to the White House. He’s not even the first candidate to run for presidency while incarcerated. That piece of history belongs to Eugene V. Debs, who ran for the Socialist Party in 1920 and won about 1 million votes, or about 3 percent. (AP Photo, File)
Who was Debs?
Born in 1855, Debs was a vocal labor activist from a young age: an ardent unionist and leader, he was jailed for six months after the 1894 Pullman Railroad strike for violating a federal no-strike order.
He became an ardent socialist and was a founding member of the Socialist Party of America, and ran for president as a socialist in 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912.
In 1918, however, he was imprisoned for speaking out against American involvement in World War I, a violation of the sedition laws passed at the time, but his incarceration in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta did nothing to diminish Debs’s profile, and in 1920 he was again his party’s presidential nominee.
How did he cope with running while in prison?
Being in prison doesn’t mean he can’t campaign: While Debs obviously can’t travel the country himself, his party has used his position as a rallying point, putting his inmate number on election buttons, and a surrogate speaking for him and a video of him being told of the nomination were shown around the country, said Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University.
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“Debs’ celebrity and the novelty of running for president from a prison gave him a certain purchase,” Doherty said. “The fact that he was running from a prison gave him a credible campaign.”
